research – Page 2 – A. L. Lester

Killing your pretties

crop unrecognizable person with bright eye and rare eyelashes — Photo by lilartsy on Pexels.com

Content warning for this whole post: I’m talking about writing about death, bodies and the dead. There are no photos here, but there are disturbing photos in some of the articles I link to at the bottom of the post. I detail this after each link so you can exercise your own judgement.

The Fog of War by A. L. Lester, First in the Bradfield Trilogy, part of the Border Magic Universe

I’ve sent the manuscript of the sequel to The Fog of War this week…The Quid Pro Quo will be out on the 20th of November. So now it’s time to blog about all those interesting things I found out whilst I was writing it. And I’m starting with rigor mortis. Yay!

The book begins with the discovery of a body in the village duckpond and the characters need the time of death in order to work out people’s alibis. I’ve never written a body for which I’ve needed time of death before, so I went googling. The number of writers who do this must be extraordinary–presumably we’re all on some sort of watch-list somewhere.

When it came down to it, there’s only a page or two at most about it in the actual book, but I felt that I needed to know a lot more about the subject before I could move on with the story. This is standard for me. One of the things I find most frustrating about my own creative process is that I need to find out a lot more about subjects like this than I put in the book. To illustrate how easily I over-research, I always use the example from The Flowers of Time where I made my own butter, then clarified it to make a butter-lamp as a light source.

I didn’t go that far this time. I’m not so dedicated to my art that I’m prepared to create a corpse and observe the stages of decomposition in order to write about it properly. For both moral, practical and legal reasons. I did do a lot more reading that I probably needed to though, and squicked myself out thoroughly in the process.

Up until that point, my body, Charlotte Fortescue, had been a narrative tool–she gets offed very early in the book and she wasn’t a terribly nice person. We’re not really supposed to spend much time feeling sorry for her, she’s just the doorway for us to get into the actual plot. However, after I read all these truly gruesome accounts of what happens to a body after death, I began to feel very sorry for her indeed.

It was most uncomfortable. I didn’t want to feel pity for her…and I didn’t want reader not to feel for her, exactly, but I didn’t want people to feel they had to waste their emotions on her when she’s effectively a means to an end. I’m now stressing slightly whether I’ve struck the right balance, but it’s too late now, it’s gone off for edits and that’s that.

Here are the resources I found most helpful, whether you’re a writer looking for information, or just an interested bystander. I’ve given additional info about how distressing they are, so please do take heed. I felt wonky for a few days after reading the final one.

For an overall summary, I recommend the lovely Ofelia Grand’s blogpost, For when the poor sod needs to die. No gruesome pictures, respectful approach with a light touch, very helpful.
I then moved on to the Wiki article about rigor mortis (which has one photo of bodies in rigor, exercise care) and has a broad overview of technical stuff–also links to articles to all the other stages a body goes through after death. It’s very well-referenced.
For the forensics part of the story, I read Methods of estimation of time since death (no pictures) from this very in depth NCBI* article. Interesting, mentions maggots, don’t read at lunchtime.
However, I needed to know about bodies found in water. So I ended up at Decomposition changes in bodies recovered from water also at NCBI*. This comes with a very serious content warning, I’m not kidding people. There are photos of people who died in very unpleasant circumstances and I found it very upsetting.

*National Center for Biotechnology Information

Next time I plot something out like this I’m going to try and avoid needing forensics as a time of death because I really don’t want to have to read all these again!

Women doctors in the late nineteenth century

A bit about... Women Doctors in the Late 19th Century

Sylvia Marks qualified as a doctor in 1910, which makes her a) a bit of a prodigy because I messed up my timeline and b) someone who really knew what she wanted and went for it against all sorts of prejudice.

I’ve put a shed-load of wiki links in this, because a blog post is stonkingly inadequate to cover it all; this is a very brief summary of the actions of a load of very able, determined and amazing people. For actual proper references see at the bottom of the wiki pages, they’re pretty well annotated.

Sylvia Marks’ character was originally based on stories my grandmother used to tell about a local doctor-friend of her mother’s, who’d come and visit and sit on the kitchen table with her skirts hitched up and smoke whilst they chatted. However, once I decided she needed her own book, I needed more than just that to base her on–so I went reading.

The first woman doctor in England was Elizabeth Garrett-Anderson, who along with Sophia Jex-Blake, the first women doctor in Scotland, fought long and hard for the privilege. Garrett-Anderson exploited loopholes in the articles of the Society of Apothecaries and the British Medical Association that were immediately sewn up for a couple of decades once she’d passed through and were therefore closed to Jex-Blake.

Initially getting the education was difficult and the women paid for private tuition and had to wheedle their way into practical and observation sessions with various levels of success. There was a lot of resistance–all the usual stupid stuff about women’s poor little brains overheating with facts, being sensitive creatures who should be protected from icky medical nastiness and the like. As time went on, however, the tide gradually began to turn.

Across the UK there was a growing pressure for women to be able to formally access university education. Jex-Blake eventually became one of the Edinburgh Seven, the first women to ever be admitted to university courses in the United Kingdom in 1869. However, although the Edinburgh Seven joined the university as undergraduates they were not allowed to qualify as doctors. They scattered across Europe and most qualified in either Paris and Berne to get their M. Ds..

Finally, in 1876 new legislation meant that examining bodies were able (but not forced) to consider women medical candidates and eventually, in 1877, legislation was finally passed to enable women across the UK to be awarded degrees.

After qualifying through her loop-hole, Garrett-Anderson founded The London School of Medicine for Women (1874), along with Jex-Blake and Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman in the USA to qualify as a doctor. Jex-Blake also set up The Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women (1886). It sounds as if she wasn’t a people-person–she fell out with some of her students and one of them, Elsie Inglis, left her school and founded the Edinburgh College of Medicine for Women (1889).

These handful of women who pushed and pushed through the patriarchal mid-nineteenth century education structures forced a path for other women to follow. They were proactive in lifting up their peers and those that came behind them. However, despite all this, women doctors were pretty much confined to treating women and children and not accepted in general hospital practice. Many of them were active women’s suffragists and when war broke out in Europe in 1914 they saw it as an opportunity to show that women could serve and be useful alongside men.

Inglis, who sounds like a truly amazing person, founded the Scottish Womens Hospitals for Foreign Service in 1914, where I made Sylvia do her war-work. Louisa Garrett-Anderson initially went to Europe to set up a hospital in Paris, which impressed the military authorities so much she was invited to come back to London and set up the Endell Street Military Hospital along with her partner Flora Murray. Sylvia is a sort of composite of these amazing people–not forgetting Dr Frances Ivens, who commanded the hospital at Royaumont.

The tenacity, the dedication to both professional and personal development and the willingness to engage in public life to lift other women up is very evident when you read about all these people. It must have been a truly exhausting struggle for them. I am really pleased to be able to bring them to people’s notice again a century and more later, even in a terribly fictionalised way.

The difference between writing in the 1920s and 1970s. And a bit about colonialism in historical romance.

With The Fog of War coming out in August I thought it might be interesting to blog about the differences between writing in all the different time-periods I seem to dip in to. I went straight from writing The Flowers of Time, set in in India in the 1780s to Taking Stock in England in 1970. It was a bit of a mind-jump.

Firstly, the main difference between writing Taking Stock in the 1970s and my books before that point, was that there was no magic. Up ’til then, I’d written in the 1920s and the 1780s with a with a paranormal twist. My magical world lies underneath the real one and I try to be as accurate as possible with that. But by education I’m a medievalist focusing on Britain, so the intricate historical detail of the 1970s was all new to me when I began.

For the 1920s books, I took inspiration from family stories about living in the East End of London in the first part of the twentieth century and there was a lot of documentary stuff to read. I’m a Dorothy L. Sayers fan, too, so it was quite easy to get a 1920s murder investigation vibe going.

Initially The Flowers of Time was supposed to be in the 1920s, too—it would have worked much better with plucky lady plant collectors toddling off around the world on behalf of Kew Gardens at that point in time and I already had a universe they could have slotted in to. However as I began writing, the characters got really bolshy and insisted they were from an earlier time period and we ended up in the 1780s. This is one of the disadvantages of discovery writing. Things can take a corkscrew turn quite quickly.

The bolshy characters made a lot of reading for me, as not only was the geographical area very new to me but the history was as well. I started off reading about the East India Company from resources that were easily available to me—British historians—and then I moved on to contemporary accounts of people’s travels and finally felt I knew enough to read from Indian historians and get a proper understanding. Shashi Tharoor’s Inglorious Empire was particularly good for that. Contemporary accounts of women travellers in India the eighteenth century are very patchy and a lot of the story was based around Isabella Bird’s account of her journey across the Himalayas in the late nineteenth.

I was very conscious of not wanting my characters to be horrible colonialists–it’s one of the real risks of setting anything in British history. Everyone has some sort of connection to exploitation. Rich people trot around exploiting their empire in order to provide romantic heroines with fainting couches in pretty Georgian houses. Poor people join the army and serve in India or join the navy and collude in the slave trade. It’s easy enough to ignore all that. But does that make your main characters nice people with whom the writer and reader can empathise? Not so much, in my opinion. The Flowers of Time was hard to write for that reason and although I feel like I did a reasonable job, towards the end I felt like I maybe shouldn’t have been writing it at all because it’s basically about English people travelling through the sub-continent for fun.

I like the book because I love my characters–Jones, the non-binary academic in particular is very close to my heart. But I am very uncomfortable with the setting now and if I had given it more thought before I began to write I would probably have done it differently. On the one hand the sweeping adventures of the Kew Gardens’ plant collectors are fascinating and they were interesting to me because of my family background–my Mama used to work at the Botanical Gardens in Dublin. But on the other hand…they’re a perfect example of white people travelling all over the world ‘discovering’ things that have always been there.

I have a companion story wafting round in my head, focusing on the male secondary characters and I don’t know what I’m going to do about it. One of them is an East India Company soldier. He’s busy mapping the Himalayas and is of course, queer and a nice person. But should I be writing it in that setting? Probably not. I need to think about it some more and maybe find a different setting for the story that will still dovetail.

Anyway, after all that soul-searching with Flowers and a spell in hospital for a month to try to get a handle on the Functional Neurological Disorder–which worked very well as quiet time to write away from the family thanks!–for some reason, I decided to set Taking Stock in 1972. Firstly, this made me feel old, because I was born in 1970. Secondly, it appalled my mother, who is still cross that the second world war is being taught as history. Thirdly, it’s almost impossible to find cover art for people that gives a 1970s feel without also feeling that one is advertising a Sirdar knitting pattern. Apart from that though, it’s fine.

Map of Webber's Farm by Elin Gregory — Webber’s Farm

A lot of the farming references in Taking Stock are from my own childhood memories—the sheep dipping scenes for example—and from talking to older friends and family. I pigeon-holed a friend who worked in the City of London in the mid-1980s and extracted stock-exchange information from him, and I found a fascinating contemporary documentary on YouTube about stockbroking in the early 1960s. It was much easier to find that sense of place that I think is needed in historical fiction, because the references were all to hand. I can happily google ‘what happened in 1972’ and have a whole list of things come up that my characters would have been aware of. And the same for the 1920s really – there are millions of words written about the years immediately after the Great War and the social changes that were happening.

Those social changes make it easier to write characters who are conscious about those things and more easily sympathetic to the modern reader without ignoring all the horrendous colonialism behind British history. The 1970s are even more so, in my opinion. It’s easy to write fairy-tale historical romance stories if you ignore colonialism, social inequality and bad teeth. But if you want to do it properly, you need to take all those things into account.

Despite having a paranormal twist in most of my books, I really think of myself as writing historical romance and I take pride in getting the history right. It’s a balance though, it has to give colour and a setting without throwing the reader out of the story either with factual errors—someone one-starred my first book because I shifted the publication date of The Beautiful and the Damned back a year to fit my timeline and it clearly spoiled the whole thing for them—or with colonialist assumptions, or with making them feel they’re reading a history text-book.

As a writer it’s my job to do that and I hope I make a reasonably workmanlike job of it. I enjoy swapping between time periods, despite the dislocation that initially comes with it!

I have pages on the website with an overview of my research for The Flowers of Time and about the world of Taking Stock . You can also read all about the Border Magic universe and how the books fit together.

Am Reading

This time I have some queer sci-fi and a non-fiction book about the First World War.

A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine, Sub Zero by Angel Martinez and Elsie and Mairi Go to War by Diane Atkinson.

A Memory Called Empire & A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine

Cover, A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine

Cover, A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine

So, I’m late to the party with this duology. I have read both in the last week and been blown away by them. The world-building is amazing, the character development is fascinating and the way everything pulls against each other…the different cultures, the different expectations…is perfect.

In the first book there is the tension between the Stationer culture and the ever-expanding Teixcalaan empire, which have radically different values and ways of being. They are both human, but the Teixcalaan’s don’t really see non-Teixcallaanim as being real people. In book two, the human cultures are thrown against aliens who are so completely <i>other</i> that the Sationers and the Teixcallaani need to put aside their differences to learn to communicate with them and survive as a species.

Interwoven with the big, space-opera story of both books is a delicate, touching, personal story of the tentative relationship growing between the Stationer ambassador to Teixcalaan and her Teixcallaan translator. They struggle with their feelings and cultural differences against a background of violence, attempted rebellion and political maneuvering.

I found the whole thing completely absorbing and I’ll be going back to them in a few months, as I’m sure there’s stuff I’ve missed. It’s rich, textured and absorbing. Read them. They’re good.

Elsie and Mairi Go to War by Diane Atkinson

I read this as part of research into women doctors and nurses in the First World War for a story I’m writing. It started off a bit of a mad dash though the pages, extracting information to use as background colour. However, I soon got sucked into the story for its own sake…they were amazing women who saw a job that needed doing and did it. They spent a great deal of time running a first aid post very close to the Belgian lines in the cellar of a bombed out building and went out every night looking for wounded who had been overlooked on the battlefield. Their story is told through letters and photos and recollections and is a very easy read.

Elsie was quite a bit older than Mairi and I took an instant dislike to her…she was clearly an adventuress who thrived on adrenaline. She lied about being a divorcee and having a child to the Belgian nobleman she went on to marry during the war. Afterwards when he found out and they parted, she flitted from one thing to another…for example setting up a first aid post in the East End of London during the General Strike and actually causing more problems than she solved.

Mairi on the other hand settled back to post-war life with comparative ease. She, a close friend and a couple of other women opened a chicken-breeding farm in Scotland, temporarily moved the whole shebang to Guernsey and from thence back to Scotland again.

I found it a really interesting, colourful book that brought the protaganists to life. I also came away with a distinct feeling that Mairi had a crush on Elsie. She never married although she and her close friend lived together for decades after the war. Although that isn’t surprising for women of that generation, I guess, because of the swathes of men lost in the trenches.

Sub Zero (The ESTO Universe) by Angel Martinez

I loved this queer SFF story. It has a really well defined sense of place–a planet colonized by humans not once, but twice. The first colonizers abandoned their genetically engineered slaves who then became indigenous and more and more undervalued in the eyes of the second wave of humans when they arrive.

The main protagonists are a human and a not-quite-human, one sent to solve a murder, one accused of it. They fall in love, they solve the mystery, they bring a better sense of balance to the world. It sounds so simple.

But the universe is deeply textured, the details are painted with a bright, engaging brush and the relationship between the MCs grows at a steady, tender pace. It’s lovely and you should read it.

That’s it for this time!

What happens when it’s over?

This week I’m back in the saddle with Sylvia Marks. This has meant a lot of reading about early women doctors and the ways women served in the First World War and generally immersing myself in the world of 1920. I’m not quite talking in the slang of the era, but it’s a near thing.

Cover, Elsie and Mairi Go to War by Diane Atkinson

One of the things I’ve been reading is Elsie and Mairi go to War, the story of Mairi Chisholm and Elsie Knocker, who met at a motorcycling club in 1912 and when the war began joined a private ambulance service and shipped out to Belgium. They spent four years so close to the front that they could hear the men in the trenches talking, running a first aid post in the basement of a ruined house in a destroyed village.

It made me think about a conversation I had with a friend when I first began to kick this story around. My grandmother had memories of Dr Fox, a lady doctor from Wellington in Somerset in the years before the First World War. She used to come round and visit my Great-Grandmother and sit on the kitchen table with her skirts hitched up, smoking and swinging her legs as they chatted. My friend is part of the Fox family and says that her husband can remember Dr Fox from when he was a child, probably the 1950s/60s? A tough old bird and smoked like a chimney are the two things that most stood out to him then. My friend also has a vague memory of another woman who was a doctor in France between 1914 and 1918 and then came home, got married and left medicine. I am hoping she’ll be able to find her name so I can do some more research about her.

I knew when I began writing about Sylvia…at the urging of Loukie*, who fell in love with her bit-part in Inheritance of Shadows…that whatever I was going to be writing would have elements of lesbian romance. But it’s also turning out to be a story…three different stories, because it’s a trilogy…about what you do when the thing that defined you really strongly for a long time suddenly stops.

That’s the thing I’ve taken away from Elsie and Mairi go to War—the way some people can throw dreadful, traumatic things off to an extent and settle back into what passes for ‘normal’. And other people, like Elsie Knocker, simply can’t.

*Editor Extraordinaire